St. Mary's Will Now Offer Masses in Byzantine Rite Through the Spring

East meets west at St. Mary's Chapel this Sunday, Dec. 3, when Rev. Michael Moisin celebrates the 9:30 a.m. Mass in the Byzantine Rite using the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

It is the first in a series of Byzantine Masses that will be offered at 9:30 on the first and third Sundays of the month at St. Mary's through the academic year by Fr. Moisin, a priest of St. Mary's Byzantine Mission of the Romanian Catholic Diocese of Canton, Ohio.

The Byzantine Liturgy - sung primarily in English, with passages in Greek, Slavonic and Romanian - satisfies the Sunday Mass obligation for Roman Catholics, Fr. Moisin's Romanian Catholic diocese being in full communion with Rome.

"More than 100 million Christians worship according to the Byzantine rite, by far the largest and most widely diffused of the Eastern rites in the Church," said Assoc. Prof. Michael J. Connolly (Slavic and Eastern Languages), an archdeacon in the Armenian Catholic rite who will assist at the Byzantine Mass.-Mark Sullivan